Welcome to understand.ai

Our goal is to make autonomous driving safe and reliable. The opportunity to push the boundaries of technology to enable new modes of mobility that offer increased choice, comfort and confidence inspires us everyday.

Quality benefits from advanced technologies

Our mission is to provide training and validation data to increase the accuracy of autonomous driving algorithms for mobility companies.

Launched in 2016, founders Marc Mengler and Philip Kessler recognized the importance of accuracy in annotated data for self-driving vehicles to intelligently perceive the road ahead. With the vision to keep passengers and pedestrians safe, they focused on contributing to the qualitative perception of self-driving cars.

With the combination of machine learning algorithms and human intelligence their idea quickly formed into a fast growing start-up. We have grown to a team of more than 40 exceptional individuals, with three office locations and managed projects with more than 100 million annotated images. But, this is just the beginning. For our customers to succeed, billions of images must be annotated to precisely train and validate autonomous driving models.

Our team consists of diverse individuals with wide-ranging talents – the majority are engineers with relevant expertise previously working at companies including BMW, Bosch, Google and Mercedes-Benz.

The passion behind it

Driven by our mission we create the foundation of data for the development of safe algorithms.

Philip Kessler
Co-founder & CTO

Philip’s commitment to enabling the future of autonomous driving began with developing an autonomous driving model car with the student group KITcar. During his studies in computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Philip deepened his passion with an internship in the machine learning and data science department at Mercedes Benz in Silicon Valley. There he worked in a highly international pre-development team building early prototypes to showcase new technologies. Philip is a regional director of The Kairos Society, a global community of young entrepreneurs.

Marc Mengler
Co-founder & CEO

Coming from an entrepreneurial family, Marc Mengler obtained a Master in Entrepreneurship & SME Management and a second Master in Data Science and Machine Learning to combine his passion for startups and deep tech research. During his academic research, he analyzed the impact of high-quality data on the robustness of state-of-the-art neural networks. This lead to the founding of understand.ai with the goal to build a scalable services model, based on a repeatable quality process and advanced technologies, for efficiently creating accurate training and validation data. On a personal level, Marc has been honored to have played chess against three world champions.

We work worldwide

Our headquarters is in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was named center of artificial intelligence in Germany, home to one of the leading European IT universities and industry-leading research centers like FZI and Fraunhofer. To stay connected with customers and other centers of AI expertise, we are also in Berlin and San Francisco.

KarlsruheSilicon Valley of Germany

Our headquarter is in Karlsruhe, named the center of artificial intelligence by the federal ministry of economic and energy. To be connected with customers and other centers of artificial intelligence, we are also proud to call Berlin and San Francisco home.

San FranciscoHeart of the computer industry

Our second location is in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, home of the largest tech companies and known to be the leading hub for high-tech innovation and development. The first autonomous vehicles are being tested in this area, and we are glad to be part of this vibrant and growing part of the world.

BerlinFast growing startup ecosystem

We are also present in Berlin, the fastest-growing start-up ecosystem in Germany. Many of the start-ups are using artificial intelligence for their business. Some well-known Tier 1 companies are also located in Berlin. A city known for its historical features and its cultural diversity.